Part 5

“It does not matter,” said de Moulny, but his long upper lip quivered and the water stood in his own eyes. “They will make a priest of me now, that is all. She”--he jerked his chin in the direction of the busy Sister--“would say the foil-thrust was a special grace. Tell me how Paris is looking? I have not seen the slut for--how long?” He began a laugh, and broke off in the middle, and gave a grimace of pain. “_Dame!_--but that hurts!” he said before he could stop, and saw his smart reflected in the other’s shamed, wet face, and winced at it.

“Pupil 127 must not excite himself or elevate his voice above a whisper in speaking. The orders of the Surgeon attending are stringent. It is my duty to see that they are obeyed.”

Sister Edouard-Antoine had spoken. Hector rose up and saluted as the nun came gliding down the avenue of beds towards them, her beads clattering and swinging by her side, her black robes sweeping the well-scrubbed boards, her finger raised in admonition, solicitude on the mild face within the _coif_ of starched white linen....

“They shall be obeyed, my Sister,” said de Moulny in an elaborate whisper. The Sister smiled and nodded, and went back to her work. Hector, on a rush-bottomed chair by the low bed, holding the hot, thin, bony hand, began to say:

“I went out yesterday--being Wednesday. Paris is looking as she always looks--always will look, until England and Russia and Germany join forces to invade France, and batter down her forts and spike her batteries, and pound her churches and towers and palaces to powder with newly-invented projectiles, bigger than any shell the world has ever yet seen, filled with some fulminate of a thousand times the explosive power of gunpowder....”

“Go it!” whispered de Moulny. Then a spark of fanatical enthusiasm kindled in his pale blue eyes. “An explosive of a thousand times the power of gunpowder, you say!” he repeated. “Remember that inspection, and the grimy neck and black hands that cost me my Corporal’s _galon_! I had been working in the Department of Chemistry that morning.... I had got all that black on me through a blow-up in the laboratory. _Nom d’un petit bonhomme!_ I thought I had discovered it--then!--that explosive that is to send gunpowder to the wall. Listen----”

“Do not excite yourself!” begged Hector, “or the Sister will turn me out.”

De Moulny went on: “I shall pursue the thing no further, for how shall one who is to be a Catholic priest spend his time inventing explosives to destroy men? But--one day you may take up the thread of discovery where I left off.”

“Or where the discovery went off!” suggested Hector.

De Moulny grinned, though his eyes were serious.

“Just so. But listen. I had been reading of the experiments made in 1832 by Braconnot of Nancy, who converted woody fiber into a highly-combustible body by treating it with nitric acid. And I dipped a piece of carded cotton-wool in nitric, and washed it. Then I dipped it in concentrated sulphuric. The sulphuric not only dehydrated the nitric--_saisissez_?--but took up the water. Then it occurred to me to test the expansive power of the substance in combustion by packing it into a paper cone and lighting it. Well, I was packing the stuff with the end of an aluminum spatula, into the little paper case, when--but you must have heard?”

“Ps’st! Br’roum! Boum!” Hector nodded. “I heard, most certainly! But let me now tell you of Wednesday.” He leaned forwards, gripping the seat of the rush-bottomed chair between his knees with his strong supple red hands as he had gripped the edge of the prison stool, and his bright black eyes were eager on de Moulny’s.

“First I went and looked up at the outside of the great Carmelite Convent in the Rue Vaugirard--the place where I was taken when I was eight years old, to say good-by to my mother before she went away.... Where she was going they would not tell me--nor, though I have always received a letter from her regularly twice a year, has there ever been any address or postmark upon it by which I might be guided to find out her whereabouts. But of course she is at Widinitz, in the Priory Convent there. And it seems to me that she did right in returning. In her place I should have done the same. _He_ says I say so because I have Carmel in my blood!”

A faint pink flush forced its way to the surface of de Moulny’s thick sallow skin. He whispered, averting his eyes:

“You have spoken to him about...?”

“When he heard of our--difference of opinion, he naturally inquired its cause.”

Hector’s small square white teeth showed in a silent mocking laugh that was not good to see. “He thought I fought in defense of my father’s honor. He said so. He may say so again--but he will not think it now!”

The boyish face changed and hardened at the recollection of that interview. Terrible words must have been exchanged between the father and the son. De Moulny, cadet of a family whose strongest hereditary principle, next to piety towards the Church, was respect towards parents, shuddered under his wicker-basket and patchwork coverlet. There was a cautious tap at the black swing-doors leading out upon the tile-paved passage. They parted, Madame Gaubert appeared looking for the Sister, caught her mild eye as she glanced round from her work, beckoned with an urgent finger and the whole of her vivacious face.... The Sister rose, and the face vanished. As the doors closed behind the nun’s noiseless black draperies, Hector took up his tale:

“I said to him that the terms upon which he had permitted my mother to return to the bosom of the Church were infamous. He laughed at first at what he called my pompous manner and fine choice of words. He was very witty about the recovery of the dowry--called it ‘_squeezing the Pope’s nose_,’ ‘_milking the black cow_,’ and other things. All the while he pretended to laugh, but he gnashed his teeth through the laughter in that ugly way he has.”

“I know!” de Moulny nodded.

“Then he reproached me for unfilial ingratitude. He said it was to endow his only son with riches that he demanded return of the dowry--the surrender of the three-hundred-thousand silver thalers.... ‘You are a child now,’ he told me, ‘but when you are a man, when you need money for play, dress, amusements, pleasure, women, you will come to me hat in hand.’ I said: ‘Never in my life!...’ He told me: ‘Wait until you are a man!’”

Hector pondered and rubbed his ear. De Moulny cackled faintly:

“He tweaked you well when he told you to wait, I see!”

Hector nodded, grimacing.

“To pull the hair, or tweak the ear, that was his Emperor’s habit, when he was in a good temper.... My father copies the habit, just as he carries Spanish snuff loose in the pockets of his buff nankeen vests and wears his right hand in the bosom--so!” He imitated the historic pose and went on: “He kept it there as he pinched and wrung with the left finger and thumb”--the speaker gingerly touched the martyred ear--“laughing all the time. I thought my ear would have come off, but I set my teeth and held my tongue.... Then he let go, and chucked me under the chin--another trick of the Emperor’s. ‘A sprig of the blood-royal for Luitpold’s blood-pudding! That is not a bad return! We shall have a fine Serene Highness presently for those good people of Widinitz.’ And he went away laughing and scattering snuff all over his vest and knee-breeches; he calls pantaloons ‘the pitiable refuge of legs without calves.’ Now, what did he mean by a Serene Highness for those good people of Widinitz?”

“I--am--not quite sure.” De Moulny pastured upon a well-gnawed finger-nail, pulled at his jutting underlip, and looked wise. “What I think he meant I shall not tell you now--! What I want you to do now is to swear to me, solemnly, that you will never touch a franc of that money.”

“I have promised.”

“A promise is good, but an oath is better.”

Hector began to laugh in a sheepish way, but de Moulny’s knobby forehead was portentous. That mass of gold, reclaimed from the coffers of the Convent of Widinitz seemed to him the untouchable thing; the taking it unpardonable--an act of simony his orthodox Catholic gorge rose at. So, as Hector looked at him, hesitating, he gnawed and glowered and breathed until he lost patience and hit the basket that held up the bedclothes with his fist, and whispered furiously:

“Swear, if you value my friendship! And I--I will swear, as you once asked me--remember, Redskin!--as you once asked me!--to be your friend through life--to the edge of Death--beyond Death if that be permitted!”

Ah me! It is never the lover who loves the more, never the friend whose friendship is the most ardent, who seeks the testing-proof of love or friendship, who demands the crowning sacrifice in return for the promise of a love that is never to grow cool, a loyalty that shall never fail or falter....

* * * * *

Perhaps if the boy who was now to repeat the vow that the other boy dictated had known at this juncture all that its keeping was to involve, he would have taken it all the same. Here before him lay his chosen friend, brought to the verge of that grave of which he spoke, laid low in the flower of his youth, in the pride of his strength, by the hand of him who loved him; the bright wings of his ambition clipped, the prosaic, sedentary life of a theological student unrolled before him instead of the alluring, vari-colored career of soldierly adventure, his well-loved researches in War-chemistry _tabu_ forever by that pale, prohibitory reflection of the priestly tonsure.... Do you wonder that his will was as wax in the molding hands?

De Moulny’s Rosary, disinterred at the commencement of his wound-sickness from among the cake-crumbs and bits of flue at the bottom of his dormitory kit-locker by Sister Edouard-Antoine when searching for nightcaps, hung upon one of the iron knobs at the head of his bed.... He reached up a long gaunt arm to get it; gave the blue string of lapis-lazuli beads, with the silver _Paternosters_ and silver-scrolled and figured Crucifix, into Hector’s hands, ... bade him, in a tone that already had something of the ecclesiastical authority, kiss the sacred Symbol and repeat the vow.

“‘I, Hector-Marie-Aymont-von Widinitz Dunoisse, solemnly swear and depose’--where did de Moulny get all the big words he knew? ... ‘swear and depose that I will never profit by one penny of the dowry of three-hundred-thousand silver thalers paid to the Prioress of the Convent of Widinitz as the dowry of my mother, the Princess Marie-Bathilde von Widinitz, otherwise Dunoisse, in religion Sister Térèse de Saint François. So help me, Almighty God, and our Blessed Lady! Amen.’”

He kissed the Crucifix de Moulny put to his lips, and de Moulny took the oath in his turn:

“And I, Alain-Joseph-Henri-Jules de Moulny, solemnly swear to be a faithful, true, and sincere friend to Hector-Marie-Aymont-von Widinitz Dunoisse, through Life to the edge of Death, and beyond Death--if that be permitted? _In Nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti._ Amen.”

IX

The Crucifix was duly saluted, the Rosary hung back upon the bed-knob.

“Embrace me now, my friend,” said de Moulny, his blue eyes shining under a smooth forehead. Hector held out his hand.

“We will shake hands as English boys do. They ridicule our French way of kissing, Miss Smithwick says.”

“And we die of laughter,” said de Moulny, “when we see them hand a lady a cushion or a chair, or try to make a bow. If I had not this basket on my stomach I would get up and show you how my cousin Robert Bertham comports himself in a drawing-room. He is certainly handsome, but stiff! His backbone must be a billiard-cue, _nom d’un petit bonhomme_! Yet he can run and jump and row, for if he has not the grace of an athlete he has the muscles of one. He was stroke of the Eton Eight last year; they rowed against the School of Westminster in a race from Windsor Bridge to Surly and back, and beat. They have beaten them again this year, Bertham tells me in his last letter. He writes French with a spade, as M. Magne would say.”

The nerves of both boys were tingling still with the recollection of the double compact they had sealed with an oath. Now they could look at one another without consciousness, and were glad to talk of Bertham, his English awkwardness and his British French. For mere humanity cannot for long together endure to respire the thin crystal air of the Higher Emotions. It must come down, and breathe the common air of ordinary life, and talk of everyday things, or perish. So Hector listened while de Moulny held forth.

“Bertham will be Bertham of Wraye when he succeeds to the peerage of his father. It is of ancient creation and highly respectable. He is my cousin by virtue of an alliance between our houses some eighteen years back, when my grandmother’s youngest daughter--my Aunt Gabrielle--married Lord Bertham, then Ambassador for England here. You know the English Embassy in the Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré? My grandmother did not approve of the union at first, the Berthams are Protestants of the English Establishment. But an agreement was arrived at with regard to my aunt’s faith and the faith of her daughters. The sons, Robert and the younger boy ... but that’s my grandmother’s cross, she says, that she has heretics for grandsons.... My Aunt Gabrielle is a charming person--I am very fond of her. She boasts of being English to the backbone ... pleases her husband by wearing no costumes that are not from the _atelier_ of a London _couturiére_--that must be _her_ cross, though she does not say so!” De Moulny grinned at his own joke.

“How you talk!” said Hector, flushed with admiration of his idol’s powers of conversation.

“I like words,” said the idol, lightly taking the incense as his due. “Terms, expressions, phrases, combinations of these, please me like combinations in Chemistry. I do not enjoy composition with the pen; the tongue is my preference. Perhaps I was meant for a diplomatic career.” His face fell as his eyes rested upon the basket that humped the bedclothes. It cleared as he added, with an afterthought:

“Diplomacy is for priests as well as statesmen. Men of acumen and eloquence are wanted in the Church.” De Moulny folded his lean arms behind his head, and perused the whitewashed ceiling.

“Tell me more about your cousin Bertham,” Hector begged, to lure de Moulny from the subject that had pricks for both.

“You are more interested in him than I am,” said de Moulny. “He writes to me, but I have not seen him since I spent an autumn month at their _château_ of Wraye in Peakshire two years ago. Their feudal customs were interesting, but their society.... Just Heaven, how dull! Even my Aunt Gabrielle could not enliven us. And he--my cousin Robert--who cannot fence, was scandalized because I do not box. Because I said: ‘If you fight with your fists, why not with the teeth and the feet?’ That I should speak of the _savate_--it made him very nearly ill.... He implored: ‘For God’s sake, never say that in the hearing of any other Eton fellows! They’ll make my life a hell if you do!’ Say that in English, Redskin, you who have the tongue of John Bull at your finger-ends.”

Hector translated the words into the original English and repeated them for de Moulny’s amusement.

“It must be a queer place, that Eton of theirs,” went on de Moulny. “When they leave to enter their Universities they know nothing. Of Mathematics, Chemistry, Physics, Arithmetic, they are in ignorance. Their rowing and other sports--considered by all infinitely more important than intellectual attainments--are ignored by the Directors of the School, and yet--to these their chief efforts are addressed; to excel in strength is the ambition above all. They are flogged for the most trifling offenses, upon the naked person with a birch, by the Director-in-Chief of Studies, who is a clergyman of the Established Church. And the younger boys are servants to their elders.”

“We make them so here,” said Hector pointedly. “We subject them to the authority that others exercised over us, and that they in their turn will use over others.”

“Subjects are not serfs. These younger boys of Eton are worse used than serfs. They call the system of torture ‘fagging’; it is winked at by the Directors,” explained de Moulny. “To be kicked and tormented and beaten--that is to be fagged. To carry coals to make your master’s fire, to bring him buckets of water from the pump, to sweep and dust and black his boots, make his bed and sleep on the floor without even a blanket if he does not choose that you shall enjoy that luxury--that is to be fagged, as Bertham knows it. They are infinitely worse off than we, these sons of the English nobles and great landed gentlemen. And yet one thing that we have not got, they have”; de Moulny thrust out his underlip and wagged his big head, “and it is worth all--or nearly all these things we have that they have not. They are loyal to each other. There is union among them. In Chemistry we know the value of cohesion.... Well!... there is cohesion among these Eton boys. How much of it is there here? Not as much as--that!” He measured off an infinitesimal space upon the bitten finger-nail, and showed it to Hector, who nodded confirmatively, saying:

“There is no currying favor with _pions_ and tattling to masters, then? Or lending money at usury to other pupils--_hein_?”

“No!” said de Moulny, with a frowning shake of the head. “There is none of that sort of thing. Because--Bertham told me!--the boy who was proved to be guilty of it would have to leave Eton. Instantly. Or--it would come about that that boy would be found dead; and as to how he died”--he shrugged his shoulders expressively--“it would be as possible to gain an explanation from the corpse, Bertham says, as to wring one from the resolute silence of the School.”

Hector knew a delicious thrill of mingled horror and admiration of those terrible young Britons, who could maintain honor among themselves by such stark laws, and avenge betrayal by sentence so grim.

“But there are other rules in the Code of Eton that are imbecile, absolutely, on my honor, idiotic!” said de Moulny. “Not to button the lower button of the waistcoat--that is one rule which must not be broken. Nor must Lower boys turn up their trousers in muddy weather, or wear greatcoats in cold, until their elders choose to set the example. And unless you are of high standing in the School, you dare not roll your umbrella up. It is a presumption the whole School would resent. For another example, you are invariably to say and maintain that things others can do and that you cannot, are bad form. Bertham saw me make a fire one day, camp-fashion, in five minutes, when he had been sweating like a porter for an hour without being able to kindle a dead stick. ‘It’s all very well,’ he said, with his eyebrows climbing up into his curly hair, ‘for a fellow to light fires; but to do servant’s work well is bad form, our fellows would say.’”

“Why did you want a fire?” demanded Hector, balancing his rush-bottomed chair on one hind-leg.

“To boil some water,” de Moulny answered, his eyes busy with the flowery, sunshiny parterres of the Director’s garden. “Up on the Peakshire hills,” he added, a second later, “to heat some water to bathe a dog’s hurt leg. Oh! there’s not much of a story. Bertham and I had been out riding; we had dismounted, tied our horses to a gate, and climbed Overmere Hill to look at a Roman camp that is on the top--very perfect: entrenchments, chariot-road, even sentry-shelters to be made out under the short nibbled grass.... Sheep as black as the gritstone of the Peakshire hills were feeding there, scattered all about us--lower down an old white-haired shepherd was trying to collect them; his dog, one of the shaggy, long-haired, black-and-white English breed that drives and guards sheep, seemed not to know its business. Bertham spoke of that, and the shepherd explained in his _patois_ that the dog was not his, but had been borrowed of a neighbor--a misfortune had happened to his own. It had got the worst in a desperate fight with another dog, a _combat à outrance_, fought perhaps in defense of its master’s sheep; it was injured past cure; he thought he would fetch up a cord later, from the farm whose thatched roofs we could see down in the valley below, and put the unlucky creature out of its pain. We thought we might be able to do something to prevent that execution, so Bertham and I went to the shed, an affair of hurdles and poles and bunches of heather, such as our Breton shepherds of Finistère and the Côtes du Nord build to shelter them from the weather....”

“And the dog?”

“The dog was lying in a pool of blood on the beaten earth floor. A shoulder and the throat were terribly mangled, a fore-leg had been bitten through; one would have said the creature had been worried by a wolf rather than a dog of its own breed. And she was sitting on the ground beside it, holding its bloody head in her lap....”

De Moulny’s eyes blinked as though the Director’s blazing beds of gilliflowers and calceolarias, geraniums and mignonette, had dazzled them. Hector asked, with awakening interest in a story which had not at first promised much:

“Who was she?”

De Moulny stuck his chin out, and stated in his didactic way:

“She was the type of _jeune personne_ of whom my grandmother would have approved.”

“A young girl!” grumbled Hector, who at this period esteemed the full-blown peony of womanhood above the opening rosebud. He shrugged one shoulder so contemptuously that de Moulny was nettled.

“One might say to you, ‘There are young girls and young girls.’”

“This one was charming, then?” Hector’s waning interest began to burn up again.

“Certainly, no! For,” said de Moulny authoritatively, “to be charming you must desire to charm. This young girl was innocent of any thought of coquetry. And--if you ask me whether she was beautiful, I should give you again the negative. Beauty--the beauty of luxuriant hair, pale, silken brown, flowing, as a young girl’s should, loosely upon shoulders rather meager; the beauty of an exquisite skin, fresh, clear, burned like a nectarine on the oval cheeks where the sun had touched it; beauty of eyes, those English eyes of blue-gray, more lustrous than brilliant, banded about the irises with velvety black, widely opened, thickly lashed--these she possessed, with features much too large for beauty, with a form too undeveloped even to promise grace. But the quality or force that marked her out, distinguished her from others of her age and sex, I have no name for that!”

“No?” Hector, not in the least interested, tried to look so, and apparently succeeded. De Moulny went on: